Influitive, a business-to-business customer advocate system provider, has unveiled the AdvocateHub, a platform that lets users recruit customer advocates, in addition to managing and tracking the tasks they perform on behalf of the company.

"Word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly important to companies," remarks Mark Organ, co-founder and CEO of Influitive as well as a co-founder of the marketing automation firm Eloqua. "[AdvocateHub] is about taking people who already love your product but are very busy and persuading them to do an activity for you."

The inspiration to create Influitive, according to Organ, came from his realization while developing Eloqua, that customer advocates were an important component of the marketing and sales cycle. "At the core of solutions like Eloqua and [its competitor] Marketo lies a prospective qualified buyer and no one speaks to interested buyers better than customers who are already using your product," Organ maintains.

But rather than pursue advocates in the business-to-consumer space, AdvocateHub is targeted at businesses. While the pool of potential business-to-business customer advocates is smaller compared to the business-to-consumer space, the value of an executive advocate is "much greater and can reach at least six figures," Organ argues.

Previously available only to a handful of companies in closed beta, the AdvocateHub includes a custom-branded portal for advocates to join and templates of challenges or tasks for advocates to complete. The challenges range from referrals and references to case studies and social media participation.

Advocates earn badges and points as they complete each challenge, which they can redeem for rewards. The rewards include donations to a charity of the advocate's choice, phone conversations with experts, and exclusive invitations to C-suite level dinners. The platform also integrates with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com.

Forty companies, including Xactly, Act-On, M5, and DemandBase, were part of the beta program. Any company can now use the product for free for an unlimited time. Once users have 20 active advocates they will be automatically charged $500 a month.